Jupiter 20150120 00:50 UT
1st time outside in weeks to do some imaging of Comet Lovejoy.
Total Bust. Managed to find it in the scope but its much too big to see in the field of view of the camera.
Then I tried some imaging of Jupiter. That wasn’t too bad at all. It was early evening and Jupiter was 11-12 deg above the eastern horizon. Not the best at all for imaging but its a work night and I couldn’t stay out too late.. this was in and around 19:50
I was using our 20cm “starbuck” dobsonian, the ASI120MC camera and a drift scan method. No tracking at all, just let Jupiter cross the field of view in the 1200mm focal length over the course of 20-30 seconds or so.
I was trying out the new beta version of firecapture2.4 as the camera software controller and it is not too shabby. The user interface is getting much better!
After a few runs I was getting anywhere from 300-500 images in the 20-30 seconds, each running at 5ms exposure.
Time to pack it in, head inside, and run the 10 sets through processing software autostakkert!.
Of the 10, only 3 were of any good, the rest were overexposed as I was trying to find a good value starting up in the 100ms area.
I am still very impressed by the software… this is the best of the 3 runs processed and this was using default settings to process and basically 3 mouse clicks and 5 minutes each to run on the 4 year old netbook.
Murphy knows how much better the image can get when I learn more about processing and let Jupiter get higher in the sky!
I’ve cropped out the moons (which just barely showed up in 5ms exposures, not at all in 1 and 2 ms).
This was more of a dry run in preparation for Friday nights 2 shadow event and Saturday mornings 3 shadow event.